IIIF for Educators

Mixtech

💡 Concept

In the pre-digital era, people passed songs to one another by means of a primitive aural technology called mixtape. They captured sounds of various kinds, such as music, storytelling, and beasts in the wild, on long scrolls of magnetized film, or "tape." Various mechanical devices large and small with complex internal gearing, levers, and belts wound and re-wound tapes, often hundreds of feet long, inside small rectangular packages, or cassettes. Tapes with pre-recorded sound were sold in public markets, but blanks were also popular, as they could be used to capture (bootleg) ritual performances or to copy other tapes. A vernacular culture around mixtapes emerged as a means to creatively combine musical and other tracks from disparate sources as entertainment of one's own, or to share with friends. Cassettes were eclipsed by other formats, but they can still be found rattling around in small pockets, and they continue to exert a nostalgic grip on our collective imagination. 

In 21st-century cultural heritage, the IIIF standard for interoperable digital collections enables the curation, sharing, and distribution of items sourced from multiple institutions over the web. A scrappy little tool named "Mixtape," in tribute to the cassette-based practice, was developed in the back rooms of Princeton University's McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning. Still in prototype, it nevertheless already serves the needs of curators, educators, and aficionados of IIIF content, who are always on the lookout for quick and easy gadgets for sharing their stuff.  

🖥️ Activity

For this hands-on activity, we will explore a small set of items that could be used in combination with the Florentine Codex for comparative study. This "teaching collection" is embedded below in the Materials section with discrete thumbnails+titles representing individual items. They can be viewed and cropped to share using the built in tools engaged by clicking the respective icons individually (below) or in groups (above right). Intrepid participants can also add or rearrange content using the editor interface linked in Tools; and they can crop and post image details in this discussion-based lab activity following directions in Steps.

📍 Location

Locating content
In the search for items to add to our teaching collection, you can literally scan the globe. (click to open and close)

Many leading cultural heritage institutions around the world offer IIIF-enabled resources. Some display the logo prominently within their collection websites. Others provide links that read 'IIIF Manifest' or 'View in Mirador' or 'Open in Viewer'.  Here are just a few examples:

• The Getty
• Bodlean Libraries, University of Oxford
• UCLA Library
• Harvard Library
• Harvard Art Museums
• Princeton Art Museum
• Princeton University's Digital PUL
• Vatican City Digital Library
• University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
• Brown University Digital Respository
• Amherst College Digital Collections

Below is a map of many more (though not all) institutions with IIIF-enabled collections

🛠️ Tools

For any enthusiasts, here is a link to the Mixtape "edit" screen. This is the interface to add and arrange resources. It accepts IIIF manifest URLs, Internet Archive item URLs, and Wikimedia Commons item URLS. This particular Mixtape (viewed below) is for demonstration purposes, so you are welcome to make additions and changes. Just note that this is a shared tool, so be aware that any changes you make are permanent.

🧱 Materials

🪜 Steps

Individual v. multiple items
Mixtape allows you to view, crop, and generate manifests for one item, selected items, or the whole collection,  (click to open and close)

1. Under each item thumbnail are icons for Mirador (viewer), Cropping Tool, IIIF (manifest), and a check box. Use any of these for a single item
2. To use multiple select items, check their boxes and click the desired function from the icons in the upper right corner
3. To use the whole collection, leave the boxes unchecked and click any of the icons in the upper right corner

Viewing in Mirador
To load an item for viewing in deep zoom. (click to open and close)

1. Click the M icon in the thumbnail box to load Mirador
2. For comparative viewing, check the boxes for items you would like to see, and click the M icon in the upper right corner
3. Click the +START HERE button in the upper left
4. Then click the +ADD RESOURCE button on the lower right (the page may jump down a bit)
5. Paste the manifest URI in the Resource location blank and click ADD. The item should load and display an item bar
6. Click the item bar to load the item in the viewer
7. Repeat for additional items
8. Item windows can be dragged into different configurations using their header bar
9. Zoom in and out, click through pages, and acclimate yourself to the many viewing settings, including thumbnail, single page, etc.

Cropping a IIIF image
To select a portion of an image (click to open and close)

1. Select the Cropping icon in an item thumbnail
2. Click thumbnail to load in the IIIF Cropping Tool viewer
3. Zoom and view
4. To crop a detail from the image, click the white pencil icon, and highlight the desired rectangle by clicking and dragging a rectangle from corner to corner
5. A thumbnail of your selected detail will appear in a slider at the bottom of the Cropping Tool. You can repeat to collect multiple details.
6. Click the Copy icon on the left side of the thumbnail

Posting with an image
To add image details to a discussion post (click to open and close)

1. Click Reply
2. To enter your image details, simply paste into the text field
3. Images can be manually resized by highlighting and dragging their corners
4. Repeat for additional images

✉️ Share

Please feel free to select, crop, and share any page detail you would like, even if just to practice the functionality. Add a comment to reflect upon the experience or speculate on possible use in your instruction.

If you really want to step outside the box, try pasting your image crop in an email and sending it to someone. It should link to the full resource loaded automatically in Mirador: a DFC-gram! 

🤝 Collaborate

Enjoy the posts submitted by other participants, and reply to express your own perspective on their material.